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Gorden Tallis has fired up at the Broncos players after their late season collapse, claiming that they are too pampered and haven’t earned the right to play at the club.
Speaking on James Graham’s The Bye Round podcast, the former Queensland great was pushed by the host on whether he thought that the current crop at Red Hill were too pampered.
“I do,” he said. “They train out of a $25m facility that has never won a trophy. They need to go back over to the old shed we trained out of that won six trophies.
“That’s just my opinion. That’s not being old school, I think you have to earn the right to live in the new house.”
Tallis went on to say that the 2022 team thought that they had achieved something by merely playing for the Broncos, rather than winning things with the club, and added that despite the club having the pick of talent in the state, they were failing to make the most of it.
“They reason they wear that Broncos brand – and the reason that I wore that Broncos brand – is because Wally Lewis wore that jersey. I know who wore that jersey.
“Wally Lewis is the most important signing, him and Gene Miles, with Wally just above him. When he signed, every kid in Queensland wanted to wear that jersey.
“From that moment on, they had the pick. Slowly, with the Cowboys getting better, the Titans and Redcliffe coming in, the scouts going and picking areas – it has been picked apart in the last ten or fifteen years, but they still get the pick of the state.
“Their goal now is that they play for the Broncos, not that they win trophies for the Broncos.”
Brisbane slumped to a record end to the season, becoming the first side to miss the top eight even though they were in the top four with six weeks to go.
Though the fall was spectacular, Tallis said that overall he still considered the season an improvement.
“I think from where they were at to where they are now, that was where they were going to finish,” he said of a team that came ninth. “But from where they were five weeks ago, I’m disappointed.
“But, if you take out the last month (of the season) and you put that in the middle, and they come home on a seven game run, we go ‘gee whizz, those couple of games in the middle weren’t that good’, but if you put them at the end, we go ‘gee wasn’t that disappointing’. I thought they were an 8th to 10th side, in that bracket.
(Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)
“They can’t do it with a rookie fullback, a rookie five-eighth and a rookie number 9. No-one can do it. That’s what people have overlooked.
“They’ve got Jake Turpin, Cory Paix and Billy Walters. They’ve got Tesi Niu, who’s so small that the Cowboys isolated him with bombs.
“When I watch Brisbane, I watch really close because it’s my old club. Last year they make the finals with the games that they’ve won. The year before that, they make the finals.
“Three times Brisbane have made the finals in the last eight years they’ve won less games than they won this year. So I think it’s a successful year from where they were at, but if they don’t improve by 25% next year, it’s a disappointment.
“That would put them in about 5th spot, and then the bonus is if they can get to that next level.”